By NOEL MURPHY
“I CAN make you beautiful,” laughs Leopold’s Pat Norman, an impish grin whipping across her face.
And she can. Or, rather, could.
As a photographic re-toucher and colourist – a trade now lost to digitalisation – Pat removed all manner of blemish and imperfection.
“I could take away your double chins, get rid of the bags under your eyes, pimples, hair that might be sticking out,” she remembered.
Now in her mid-80s, it’s many years since Pat worked with renowned Geelong photographers like John Lockwood, Robert Pockley, Ian Hawthorne and Laurie Wilson.
But she remembers them well, and the craft of making the imperfect perfect.
“If the wedding groom’s trousers were baggy you’d straighten them with a special little knife on the negative by scratching them out,” she said.
“If he had a hired coat and creases in the sleeves you’d scrape them out, too.
“It was all by drawing Ss and 8s on the negative with a 5B pencil.”
Pat said she hand-coloured photographs with cotton wool wrapped around the end of a paintbrush and used bicycle puncture kit solutions to add a bluish tinge to other images – all manner of clever tricks to brighten up faces, patch scruffy outfits.
“I did baby photos, wedding photos, all sorts of portraits,” she said.
“I don’t know a thing about photography these days. I’d rather go back to how we had it in our days.”
Mrs Norman maintains a collection of historic Geelong images acquired down the years, some of which she keeps close at hand at Leopold Lodge where she lives after growing up in Chilwell, raising a family in Corio and later moving to Drysdale.
“I’ve had cancer five times and I’ve had two strokes but they can’t kill me,” she laughed.
